THE CRIMINALS

Shanghai’d for a Month: Photographs by Tim Stegmaier

June 7 – September 20, 2015

Tim Stegmaier is a renaissance man. He holds a Fine Arts degree from Ohio University and has been at various times a painter, sculptor, poet, performance artist and photographer. He also has a 15 year background in West African dance, having studied in Guinea, Senegal, Chicago and Cincinnati and danced around the world as a member of the company of Bi-Okoto. He is a yogi, having studied the practice for more than 20 years, and with his wife, Kim, teaches Zumba in Cincinnati, Mexico and the Carribean. He is a partner in the Cincinnati-based raw/organic/vegan food producer Love Force and an activist for animal libration. Tim began his photographic study under Robert Gregory at Sycamore High School in 1983. His photographs have been published in The Sun magazine and a book of his photographs was included in the Colors Notebook exhibition in Milan, Italy, which then travelled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2007. Locally he had 18 Images selected for the book Cincinnati Snaps 2008, exhibited at the Cincinnati Art Museum. More recently he exhibited at Transylvania University in Kentucky in a show entitled Response, curated by Matt Distel, and in 2012 was included in a FotoFocus exhibition at the University of Cincinnati, Claremont. Tim has self-published 10 books of his photographs, on subjects from Africa, Americanism, Cincinnati, homelessness, landscapes, nudes, self-portraits, speciesism to, in 2014, China. When Kim became a trainer for a Montessori Education program in Shanghai and Wuhan for a month, Tim accompanied her and devoted his time to absorbing the culture with his camera, captivated by China as he has been for years by photography.